The Beatles' 'Eight Days a Week: The Touring Years' Film Gets Third Week in Theaters

"The fact that 'Eight Days a Week' continues to draw critical accolades and generate solid box-office numbers in movie theaters while simultaneously available on-demand via Hulu is a testament to the inexhaustibly profound interest that exists by today's audiences in the Fab Four."

The Beatles' Eight Days a Week: The Touring Years documentary has drawn well over its first two weeks in theaters enough to keep it there a third, Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for comScore, tells Billboard.

In weekend numbers projected for Sept. 30 to Oct. 2, comScore projected the box-office take for the Ron Howard film on 155 screens to be $336,036 with a per-screen average of $2,220. There also were 24 one-night event screenings bringing in $19,120. The doc ranked 20th in three-day estimates of films being exhibited, which was down 14 percent from the previous week.

The Beatles announced Friday that the film, which became available by streaming for home viewers on Hulu after its world premiere Sept. 15 and its theatrical release on Sept. 16, was being held for a third week by some theaters. The list of U.S. theaters is online. It will be released on DVD and Blu-ray on Nov. 18.

"The fact that Eight Days a Week continues to draw critical accolades and generate solid box-office numbers in movie theaters while simultaneously available on-demand via Hulu is a testament to the inexhaustibly profound interest that exists by today’s audiences in the Fab Four," Dergarabedian says.

"The film documents the early hectic days of touring for the band and incredibly some 50 years after they last appeared on stage together, this period of their career holds an endless fascination for Beatles fans," he continues. "The communal environment of the movie theater may be the closest we can get to revisit that defining moment in music history along with other enthusiastic fans of John, Paul George and Ringo and that has propelled the film to impressive box-office heights."

Richard Abramowitz of Abramorama, the film's distributor, says the film was No. 1 in 48 of the top 50 theaters its first week and ranked No. 1 in 45 of the top 50 theaters during its second week. He notes its best markets were New York; Boston; Pleasantville, N.Y.; Washington, D.C.; Nashville; Los Angeles; and the San Francisco Bay area.

The cumulative take for the film since its opening was $2,088,918, which Dergarabedian calls a success. "That's a good number considering the small number of theaters that it's playing and the fact that it's available at home on-demand," he says. "It opened on Sept. 16 in 85 theaters and had it not performed well, they would have never expanded into more theaters and take on the extra marketing spend required to release in more cities, etc. This slow rollout was the perfect strategy for the film and allowed the buzz to build along with the movie and generate a lot of heat. In the indie documentary world, $2 million is a lot of bucks at the box office."